Later that night Morganta was lying in bed, the room quiet except for the faint hum of her old computer still running on her desk. She had tried and failed to jailbreak Addison’s iPhone earlier, and after a few frustrating attempts she decided she would take it to Rachel tomorrow to see if she could unlock anything further. For now though, she couldn’t sleep. She had opened her laptop again, not really sure why, and found herself reading more about John Dawson. The official files were blunt and cold. Depression. Suicidal ideation. Previous police notes suggested he had been unstable in the months leading up to the disappearance. Morganta stared at the words for a long time longer than she meant to. Something about them didn’t feel like just another case detail. It felt familiar in a way she didn’t want it to.
It started with her grandmother. In 2019, when Morganta had just turned 20, her grandmother passed away at the age of 107. It wasn’t unexpected. Everyone in the family had known it was coming sooner or later, and in a strange way that made it easier to accept. Her father took it the hardest, as it had been his mother, but even then the grief felt manageable. Morganta remembered feeling sad, but not broken. Life continued. People visited, funeral arrangements were made, and eventually time did what it always does and softened the edges of the loss. For a while after that, she thought she understood grief. She thought it came in waves and then left.
But she was wrong.
Not long after, everything began to fall apart in a way she didn’t expect. Her best friend Sarah had always been the one constant in her life. Sarah was the kind of person who kept Morganta grounded, someone who checked in when things got quiet, someone who always seemed louder than the sadness around her. But Sarah had been struggling too, even if she hid it well. She had been prescribed anti-depression medication and was trying to manage her life day by day, the same way so many people do when they are barely holding things together.
Then one afternoon, it happened.
Sarah was driving through the main street of Kingsport when a drunk driver came speeding through at over 100km/h in a 20km zone. It all happened in seconds. The first impact hit a child crossing the street, and before anyone could react the same car slammed into Sarah’s vehicle. The crash was catastrophic. Both Sarah and the driver died at the scene.
Morganta didn’t find out through a phone call. She didn’t get a warning or a chance to prepare herself. She saw it on the news first. It was a live report about the crash in Kingsport, a segment showing emergency services blocking off the street. She remembers the moment the camera panned across the wreckage and her stomach dropped instantly. She recognised the car before she even heard the name. She sat frozen in front of the television, unable to process what she was seeing, as if her brain refused to connect the image with reality.
Sarah didn’t respond to her messages that day. At first Morganta assumed she was busy or asleep. Then she drove to the scene herself, telling herself she was overreacting, that it couldn’t be what she thought. But when she arrived, everything stopped being uncertain. She saw the wreckage. She saw the chaos. And she saw Sarah.
That moment stayed with her in a way she could never fully describe. It wasn’t just grief. It was something heavier, something that sank into her and never really left. Sarah had always been the one person who seemed to understand her struggles, and now she was gone in the most violent and meaningless way possible. Morganta stood there for a long time without moving, even after she was told to leave the area. She didn’t cry at first. It came later, when she was alone, and it didn’t stop for a long time after that.
After Sarah’s death, everything else in Morganta’s life began to unravel. Her job as a primary school teacher, which had once been something she cared deeply about, started to feel impossible. She was already struggling mentally, and the emotional weight of trying to be present for children every day became too much. Then came the layoff. It wasn’t dramatic or personal, just part of a broader restructuring, but to her it felt like the final thread snapping. The one thing she still had that gave her structure and meaning was gone.
Without work, her days blurred together. She stopped sleeping properly. Meals became inconsistent. Her apartment grew quieter and messier as time went on. There were days she barely left her bed, staring at the ceiling for hours without moving. Phone calls from her parents went unanswered. Messages piled up and were ignored. It wasn’t that she didn’t care, it was that everything felt too far away to reach.
Eventually, she stopped trying to pretend she was okay. The weight of everything built up until it became unbearable. There was a point where she genuinely believed there was nothing left for her. No direction, no purpose, no reason to continue. She didn’t plan anything properly, didn’t think things through, she just reached a breaking point where everything felt like too much to carry. That night ended with her attempting to end her life, and failing.
She woke up the next morning exhausted and numb, lying somewhere she didn’t fully remember getting to. She cried for a long time after that, not from pain, but from the strange fact that she was still there. Still alive. Still stuck in the same world she had tried to escape.
It was her parents who found her the next day. She had ended up outside, disconnected from everything, and they brought her home without asking too many questions at first. They didn’t scold her or turn away from what had happened. Instead, they stayed. They gave her somewhere to sleep, took care of her when she couldn’t take care of herself, and slowly started rebuilding her stability piece by piece.
They were the ones who found her the job at Martins Detective Agency. At the time, it wasn’t about ambition or career growth. It was about giving her something to hold onto, something that required focus and routine. She also began counselling, even though it took time before she could fully open up to it.
Now, years later, Morganta still carried all of it with her. She functioned, she worked, she investigated, but there were moments like this one where everything came back without warning. As she stared at John Dawson’s file on her screen, she recognised something she hadn’t expected to see in him. It wasn’t just the label of “depressed” or “suicidal.” It was the emptiness behind it. The same emptiness she had once lived in herself.
And for the first time since taking the case, she realised this wasn’t just about a missing family anymore.